The first 51 seconds of “Titus Andronicus” are self-referential to the point of dairyish, inclusive over and above anthem, and a wonderful joke because it declaims what Stickles is actually doing.
A melodic roar of aggravated annoyance, of paralysis, of nowhereness encapsulate by one of the most satisfying lines you will ever sing along to.
Throw my guitar down on the floor
No one cares what I’ve got to say anymore
I didn’t come here to be damned with faint praise
I’ll write my masterpiece some other day
No one cares what I’ve got to say anymore
I didn’t come here to be damned with faint praise
I’ll write my masterpiece some other day
Perfect frustration, blocked, writing a lyric about how he can’t write the lyric, and then? The singalong, the join in, where the band and the listener get together:
Fuck everything, fuck me
The music is all revved up guitars and the melody indelible on the first listen
and
Whatever your age, and as true of writers as of lyricist and of all we voiceless people, “no one cares what I have to say any more” is a writerly line. It is an aphorism, a cliche, a Taoist truth in a spit of desperation. Not only can’t I write but even if I can: so what? Nobody cares and what if they do? Like Dorothy Parker wrote: and so what if I don’t? And so what if I do?
The song harkens directly to Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. Another song about doing what it says it isn’t doing. Look at how the frustration stymies the writer: Stickles throws his guitar on the floor, Dylan imagines a future where: “everything will be smooth like a rhapsody”. Dylan’s nerves are jagged on the road, Stickles frustrations are stymied in his bedroom as they force their artistry to bring them to an emotional transmogrification empathized with, shared? with, enjoined by, and understood by many people: like a truth never known before they said: smooth like a masterpiece.